When it comes to Customer Experience, are we investing in the right things?
Two recent reports indicate that even given the seemingly increasing interest in and appreciation for Customer Experience investments are underperforming.
“Technology [and data] is a glittering lure” — Don Draper
A recent Forrester survey (1) shows Customer Experience quality in the United States is on the decline two years in a row and another report from the AI Infrastructure Alliance (2) shares that even if Customer Experience is the second most important reason for investment into Artificial Intelligence, poor CX is the fourth most common result.
My assumption is that this is because the focus has become to try to ‘industrialize’ the customer. To make them into a recurring pattern, an algorithm, something that can become a model, or a piece of code. To tame them.
It reminds me of Robert McNamara who under his short employment as CEO of Ford said: “you can buy your customers” ..
Today we are in such awe of the machines and their black boxes that we think we can try to make our customers into algorithms. Is that any better than McNamara?
I am sure there are many reasons why our current investments are failing. My point is merely that we need to:
- Acknowledge that it isn’t working today the way that we wanted it to
- To keep investing, but more critically and exploratory
- To put the customer at the center of the process (not the technology)
- And to challenge our proxies (which often are questionable at best (4)
Two suggestions:
1. The customer is not a person, but a system (3), if we want to “model” them we need to include the system they are a part of, we need to model for complexity and uncertainty, not simplicity and reductionism.
2. The customer is part emotional decision making. Emotions don’t follow a straight line. Modelling the customer is not to railroad them along a path and make sure they move in sequence from A to G. Our models need to be maps. Our job is more to listen than to direct. And there is no set route for everyone to take. Customers are all individuals (5).
(1). https://www.forrester.com/report/the-us-customer-experience-index-rankings-2023/RES179408
(2). https://go.clear.ml/new-research-report-on-enterprise-generative-ai-adoption
(3). https://uxdesign.cc/why-every-designer-should-be-a-systems-thinker-388e4fb7293b
(4). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapons_of_Math_Destruction
(5). https://www.sas.com/it_it/insights/articles/marketing/digitization-of-everything-buyjou.html
